Jon Cogburn's Blog

Wisdom from January, 2008

Steve Chapman-

The striking thing about President Bush's final State of the Union address is that even the successes he claims are largely fictional. Judged by his own criteria, the speech was a catalogue of failure in almost every realm.

With one year left in his term, we see a new figure: George Bush, fiscal conservative. He proposed to cut or kill 151 programs at a savings of $18 billion. He threatened a veto if Congress doesn't curb earmarks. He bragged that his new budget "will keep America on track for a surplus in 2012."

You would never guess this is the same president who had been in office nearly seven years before he finally vetoed a measure because it cost too much. Or who let non-defense discretionary spending rise nearly twice as fast as it did under Bill Clinton. Or who pushed through the biggest new entitlement program (Medicare coverage of prescription drugs) in 40 years.

The claim that he has set us on the high road to a balanced budget was not a George W. Bush moment but a George Strait moment: "If you'll buy that, I'll throw the Golden Gate in free." The Concord Coalition, a bipartisan fiscal watchdog group, calculates that 2012 will bring a deficit totaling $485 billion.

The president's proudest domestic program is the No Child Left Behind Act, which he hailed as a triumph. "Last year, 4th and 8th graders achieved the highest math scores on record," he said, referring to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. "Reading scores are on the rise." Here, he dodged data suggesting that the law has done nothing to improve educational outcomes.

Since it took effect, reading scores have barely budged among 4th graders and they have fallen among 8th graders. Math scores have risen, but not as rapidly as before. And in one international test, the Program for International Student Assessment, Americans' performance in math declined between 2003 and 2006. According to that test, says Andrew Coulson of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, "U.S. students have suffered overall stagnation or decline in math, reading and science in the years since NCLB was passed."

Bush has spent most of his energies on foreign affairs, but looking abroad does not brighten the picture. Bush claimed that because of the success of his strategy, "the surge forces we sent to Iraq are beginning to come home." The next day, though, the White House let it out that not all of them are returning just yet—and that by the time Bush leaves office, the number of American troops in Iraq may still be higher than it was before the surge began.

He said the surge has "achieved results few of us could have imagined just one year ago." In terms of violence, he has grounds for that claim. But in terms of political reconciliation, Iraqis have failed to meet many of the major benchmarks that Bush demanded a year ago.

Then, he warned Iraqis that "America's commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people." But the Iraqis have balked, and Bush is letting them get away with it.

He bragged that thanks to our help, hope is on the rise in Afghanistan. In fact, 2007 was the deadliest year for U.S. troops and Afghan civilians since 2001. The Taliban has rebounded. One administration official recently told The Washington Post, "We're seeing definite expanded strongholds. That's not going to stop in 2008. . . . If anything, it's gaining momentum." In Afghanistan, things are getting worse, not better.

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Steve Martin-

I learned a lesson;it was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the circumstances.

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Christopher Hitchens-

Gov. Mike Huckabee made the following unambiguously racist and demagogic appeal in Myrtle Beach, S.C., last week:

You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole; that's what we'd do.

This is a straightforward racist appeal for the following reasons:

1) The South Carolina flag is a perfectly nice flag, featuring the palmetto plant, about which no "outsider" has ever offered any free advice.

2) The Confederate battle flag, to which Gov. Huckabee was alluding, was first flown over the South Carolina state capitol in 1962, as a deliberately belligerent riposte to the civil rights movement, and is not now, and never has been, the flag of that great state.

3) By a vote of both South Carolina houses in the year 2000, the Confederate battle flag ceased to be flown over the state capitol and now only waves (as quite possibly it should) over the memorial to fallen Confederate soldiers.

Thus, as well as crassly behaving exactly like someone "from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," former Gov. Huckabee of Arkansas deliberately aligned himself with the rancorous minority who are still not reconciled to the idea that South Carolina may not officially consecrate racism and slavery and secession. "Your flag"? What an insult, not just to the descendants of slavery but to the many, many other loyalists and Unionists who fought and died to bring their state back into the Union. And what is the point of the "outside the state" slur? Wasn't this exactly what Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas used to say, as if to make it seem that all was hunky-dory in his own tight little dominion until them goddam "outside agitators" arrived? In the end, as Gov. Huckabee may or may not recall, the 101^st Airborne Division, most of them "outsiders" not from Arkansas, had to be sent by a Republican president to integrate the schools of Little Rock. That was a lot of trouble and expense that the big-mouth rednecks put us all to, but it was worth it. It's insufferable to hear this glib idiot make a mockery of it now in order to try to get the Klan vote in South Carolina.

One might add a couple of other points. The political flag of the Confederacy—the so-called "Stars and Bars"—is one thing. The battle flag of the Confederate army; the most militant symbolic form that secession and slavery ever took, is quite another. Under this fiery cross of St. Andrew, the state of Pennsylvania was invaded and free Americans were rounded up and re-enslaved. Under this same cross, it was announced that any Union officer commanding freed-slave soldiers, or any of his men, would be executed if captured. (In other words, war crimes were boasted of in advance.) The 13 stars of the same flag include stars for two states—Kentucky and Missouri—that never did secede, and they thus express a clear ambition to conquer free and independent states. And this is the symbol that Huckabee, seeking to ingratiate himself with the lowest element and lowest common denominator, calls "your flag." You might as well do a cross-burning and have done with it, and we all know how the networks would react if some ignorant kids did that.

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Roger Scruton-

The ancient proverbs tell us there is truth in wine. The truth lies not in what the drinker perceives but in what, with loosened tongue and easier manners, he reveals. It is "truth for others", not "truth for self". This accounts for both the social virtues of wine and its epistemological innocence. Wine does not decieve you, as cannabis deceives you, with the idea that you enter another and higher realm, that you see through the veil of Maya to the transcendental object or thing in itself. Hence it is quite unlike even the mildest of the mind-altering drugs, all of which convey some vestige, however vulagarized, of the experience associated with mescaline and LSD, and recorded by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception. These drugs--cannabis not exempted--are epistemologically culpable. They tell lies about another world, a transcendental reality beside which the world of ordinary phenomena pales into insignificance or at any rate into less significance than it has. Wine, by contrast, paints the world before us as the true one, and reminds us that if we have failed previously to know it then this is because we have failed in truth to belong to it, a defect that it is the singular virtue of wine to overcome.

For this reason we should, I believe, amplify our descripiton of the characteristic effect of wine, which is not smply an effect of intoxication. The characteristic effect of wine, when drunk in company, includes an opening out of the self to the other, a conscious step towards asking and offering forgiveness: forgiveness not for acts or omissions, but for the impertinence of existing.

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Roger Scruton-

I don't say that cannabis doesn't also have a social function. Indeed it has, and is associated in the Middle East with a hookah-smoking ritual that produces a mutual befuddlement, briefly confused with peace, a commodity rarely to be found in the region. Each intoxicant both reflects and reinforces a particular form of social interaction, and it is important to understand, therefore, that the qualities that interest us in wine reflect the social order of which wine is a part. When Samuel Huntington writes of the clash of civilizations, meaning the conflict between the Christian Enlightenment and pre-modern Islam, he ought really to be referring to another and deeper conflict: that between wine and pot. In this conflict I am on the side of wine, as were many of the greatest poets of the Islamic world.

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Eric Wilson-

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life's enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

. . . .Of course there is a fine line between what I'm calling melancholia and what society calls depression. In my mind, what separates the two is degree of activity. Both forms are more or less chronic sadness that leads to continuing unease with how things are — persistent feelings that the world is not quite right, that it is a place of suffering, stupidity, and evil. Depression (as I see it, at least) causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything one way or another. In contrast, melancholia generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing. Our culture seems to confuse these two and thus treats melancholia as an aberrant state, a vile threat to our pervasive notions of happiness — happiness as immediate gratification, happiness as superficial comfort, happiness as static contentment.

. . . .With no more melancholics, we would live in a world in which everyone simply accepted the status quo, in which everyone would simply be content with the given. This would constitute a nightmare worthy of Philip K. Dick, a police state of Pollyannas, a flatland that offers nothing new under the sun. Why are we pushing toward such a hellish condition?

The answer is simple: fear. Most hide behind a smile because they are afraid of facing the world's complexity, its vagueness, its terrible beauties. If we stay safely ensconced behind our painted grins, then we won't have to encounter the insecurities attendant upon dwelling in possibility, those anxious moments when one doesn't know this from that, when one could suddenly become almost anything at all. Even though this anxiety, usually over death, is in the end exhilarating, a call to be creative, it is in the beginning rather horrifying, a feeling of hovering in an unpredictable abyss. Most of us habitually flee from that state of mind, try to lose ourselves in distraction and good cheer. We don inauthenticity as a mask, a disguise to protect us from the abyss.

To foster a society of total happiness is to concoct a culture of fear. Do we really want to give away our courage for mere mirth? Are we ready to relinquish our most essential hearts for a good night's sleep, a season of contentment? We must resist the seductions of mindless happiness and somehow hold to our sadness. We must find a way, difficult though it is, to be who we are, sullenness and all.

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Louis the XVI-

At Versailles I lived in outrageous luxury. But today I praise you, O Lord, that I end my reign as did the wise kings of antiquity, before a simple glass of wine, in my modest room in the Tower of the Temple . . . . I am with the priest, who, at this moment, is mixing wine and water in preparation for this union of God and the furit of the vine, when wine is God, and God, wine; the very opposite of my enemies; the most savage of them drink water . . . . I am no longer king but a poor man, cut off from my own, from my children, liek a vine without its shoots.

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Glenn Greenwald-

And in this one short passage, on vivid, revolting display is every repellent attribute that defines the Standard Modern Political Journalist:

*Jaded, bitterly cynical coolness masquerading as sophistication (no emotion, no passion, is even real);

* Vapid, shallow stupidity (political matters judged exclusively by Drudge-like personality distractions);

* Mindless recitation of idiotic, Kristol-like right-wing talking points (we need manly Tough Guys, not Girly Crying, for our Wars);

* The basest and most glaringly obvious strain of sexism (no mention of the endless crying episodes from GOP Warrior-Cheerleaders);

* Their self-absorbed and almost-always-wrong belief that their own insulated biases are how the Regular Folk Think (hence, Hillary's "crying," which voters apparently either appreciated or ignored, was going to doom her candidacy, just as Huckabee's press conference would doom his in Iowa);

* Herd-like adolescent malice rituals directed towards the Hated Loser (NYT reporters grouping together to chortle and cackle oh-so-knowingly at the Wicked Witch).

Brokaw's sudden, embarrassment-driven request for the media to act differently (where has his sermon been for the last 20 years?) will not have the slightest effect on what they do. It can't, because the media stars and their editors and producers who shape coverage aren't capable of anything else. They're selected and in those positions precisely because this is all they're capable of doing.

Are Gloria Borger and Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman and Wolf Blitzer suddenly going to abandon their desire to impose shallow, melodramatic narratives on our elections and spend their time, instead, analyzing the candidates' responses to Charlie Savage's questionnaire on presidential power, or the dominant, corrosive role lobbyists and large corporations play in our political culture, or the widening rich-poor gap, or the strain and stain on our country from our imperial policies? The question is so absurd, so laughable, that to ask it is to answer it. None of them could remotely do that even if they wanted to, even if they were allowed to, and they don't and aren't.

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Gary Kamiya-

In November 2004, American voters reelected the worst president in modern history. That election did more than blight the political hopes of half the people in this country, it raised serious questions about America's very identity. What kind of country could possibly reelect a president as manifestly unfit for office as George W. Bush? Why would millions of Americans again endorse an ignorant, incompetent leader who launched a disastrous and pointless war, presided over an administration based on secrets and lies, trampled the Constitution, ran up a ruinous debt, ignored the global environmental crisis, approved torture and secret prisons, and destroyed America's moral standing in the world?

Of course, not all Americans share the same political views; of course, post-9/11 hysteria played a major role. But even making due allowance for those factors, Bush's reelection was shocking. Like an unidentified tumor that suddenly shows up on an X-ray, it cast a malaise over the whole nation. For many Americans, it revealed a foreign entity within the country itself, one even more frightening in some ways than the one outside. We can fight terrorists. But what do you do about your own country when you no longer recognize it?

The Democratic Party should have represented that half of the country that was appalled by Bushism. But the Democrats abjectly failed. Cowed by patriotic fervor and Beltway thinking, the Democrats fell in line behind Bush and his demented war. Only when it was clear to all but the most benighted neoconservative ideologues that Iraq was an unmitigated disaster did mainstream Democrats like Clinton and Edwards speak out.

A price had to be paid for this collapse, and the price was anger -- anger not just at Bush and his policies, but at the timid Democrats who went along with those policies. This anger is cleansing. Those establishment pundits who sanctimoniously tut-tutted about how Democratic voters were "unhinged" by "Bush hatred" failed to recognize that when a cancerous entity invades your body, the healthy response is to attack it. Anger is a patriotic response to Bush's profoundly un-American policies, and to the Democrats who failed to oppose them. It is the white blood cells coming to rescue an endangered organism.

Yet as anyone who spends too much time reading political blogs knows, anger can itself become a toxin, self-perpetuating and self-destructive. It must be expressed -- but then it must be overcome. To fall into a state of permanent anger, of righteous indignation, is to become the very enemy you are fighting. This is the error that George W. Bush made when he launched his Manichean "war on terror," and turned America into a country far more like its fundamentalist enemies than it had ever been before.

Barack Obama's unique appeal is that he allows voters -- Democrats, independents and fed-up Republicans alike -- to simultaneously express their anger and transcend it. As a political outsider, as a black man, as someone who was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning, Obama is the antithesis of both Bushism and the mainstream Bush-lite Democratic stance on Iraq. Yet Obama's entire message is one of reconciliation and unity, the belief that even the most implacable foes can come together.

political concession speech

Good Afternoon.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I have called this press conference to announce the withdrawal of my candidacy from consideration for my Party's nomination to be the next President of the United States.

My whole life has been devoted to making this great country a safer and kinder place, securing our leadership position in the world while taking care of those least able to take care of themselves at home. Now, as I move into the next phase of my life I will find new challenges, and new ways to do this.

I would like to congradulate the other candidates. While this campaign has been rough and tumble at times, we are all in the same Party.

Before exiting this stage, I need to address some allegations made against my campaign, claims that we have been engaged in "the politics of the past," "mudslinging," and even "racial code words." This is simply not true. My whole life has been devoted to racial reconciliation and putting forward a new kind of politics.

First, when members of my campaign staff (some of whom, in the mail room specifically, happen to be African American) kept saying that my opponent is the kind of person a ninny would pick, nothing untoward was meant. Come on folks, just look up "pick" and "ninny" in the dictionary. Even though we apologized for other people misunderstanding what we were saying, the press would not let it rest. With a media like this, it's no wonder that racial issues are still so burning in this country.

And the commercials showcasing the threat to little blond girls if my opponent is elected were just that, commercials showing the threat to little blond girls if my opponent is elected. The use of 1970's funk music in the commercials was a bold outreach to the African American community. I should note here that none of my opponent's commercials utilize 1970's funk music.

This being said, some mistakes were made. My husband should not have dressed up in black-face and sang songs from "The Jazz Singer" during those South Carolina rallies. Howver, it seems to me that the source of the mistake was having him sing songs from Neil Diamond's movie of the same name rather than from the original movie with Al Jolson. Again, though, this had nothing to do with color, and was actually the fault of my campaign co-ordinator who I should note, we did fire.

I should not have said that my opponent was "pimping around in Chicago" while I was in Washington fighting for civil rights. But honestly, they use the term "pimping" themselves.

And when in the heat of debate I called my opponent "black bastard," I was specifically referring to the circumstances of his birth. Though technically true, I should not have said this, and again apologize for other people being oversenstive.

In closing, let me just say that I never asked to be born, and you jerks won't have me to kick around any longer.

Thank you, and goodnight.

Success Dopplegangers

One of the pitfalls of our increasingly inter-connected world is that we are all doomed to be haunted by dopplegangers who are vastly more successful than ourselves at the tasks nearest and dearest to our hearts. And I don't mean being haunted by someone who is just more successful in your field; I mean someone who is more successful in actualizing your very specific life goals. Examples:

Past Success Dopplegangers
In high school and college I tried to play music equally influenced by blues and punk, and often it was just me and a drummer. Then along come Jack and Meg White and do this vastly better than I ever could. In graduate school I (with my friend Eric Ward) tried to harnass the early Bowie's specific form of dystopia in a way influenced strongly by Nine Inch Nails. Then along came Marilyn Manson who did this vastly better than I ever could.

Present Success Doppleganger
In philosophy I've long had two goals: (1) use my linguistics training to make non-trivial suggestions to outstanding philosophical debates, and (2) philosophize about my cultural practices, especially video games. Then along came Peter Ludlow (who, by the way, is a real mensch) doing this better than me.

Future Success Doppleganger
I've long wanted to write an accessible book that incorporates zany philosophy of language views in a way that has cultural and meta-philosophical relevance. Mark Silcox and I are almost finished with such a book (or at least with the version that gets initially sent to Routledge). A priori I know that the book will not have a smattering of the cultural or philosophical cachet that Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. And this is not because he hit the zeitgeist at the right time. Rorty was a much better writer and philosopher and the book deserved the influence it had.

If anyone feels like sharing their success dopplegangers, that would be cool. Again, they have to be doing something very specifically analogous to what you have been doing. It's better if you didn't know of their work when you undertook your project (by this criteria Rorty is not a good example for me).

For what it's worth, I think that everybody has to just try to learn from their success dopplegangers and not be upset about it. Very few people are even competent at very much of anything, and somebody is going to be better than you at anything you do. Our hyper-connected society rubs our face in this, and I hope the result is not that people stop trying. I'm not sure culture would have produced a Jack/Meg White, Marilyn Manson, Peter Ludlow, or Richard Rorty if a lot of people weren't doing analogous things. So just being part of the millieu is important too.

Xena for January, 2008

Season 2, Episode 16- For Him the Bell Tolls-

This episode is notable for a number of reasons. First, Ted Raimi (as Joxer) further demonstrates his great comedic acting skills. At this point in the series, he is ever bit as funny as Bruce Campell (Autocolus) and Lucy Lawless (Xena). Second, the predicament Joxer finds himself in has a very strong psychologial and philosophical resonance.

Aphrodite is scheming in the affairs of mortals by trying to break up a marriage that will unite two kingdoms. Aphrodite's son Cupid has shot arrows at both prince and princess and he is very unhappy that his Mom is undoing his work. She must though, as the unified kingdom will lead to some of her temples being destroyed (the reason for this is not explained very well). To show Cupid how powerful she is, she will let him chose her mortal champion, and of course he choses the hapless Joxer.

Aphrodite bespells Joxer so that every time he hears a bell ring he changes back and forth between himself and a heroic, poetry spouting, rake that has the ability to win any sword fight and charm any woman.  And as the rake he of course charms the princess and potentially ruins the wedding, leading to war between the two kingdoms.  Again, Raimi is brilliant here; his rake is actually convincing, and the switching back and forth is exploited with brilliant comic effect. Another great thing about this episode is that Xena is off saving another village for most of it, so Gabrielle gets to not just be the sidekick. This is exploited for humor as Joxer throughout insists that since Xena is gone, Gabrielle gets to be his sidekick now (see the song below).

The philosophically resonant aspect of the episode occurs whenever Joxer is his old self and wonders if he should take credit for the things that the bespelled Joxer does. Before he knows that it is the result of a spell he tries to say that he is in a fog of battle while defeating the enemy, but once he realizes that it's a spell he's pretty crushed. After the spell is lifted for good, his spirits are crushed and he confesses to Xena that he realizes he's been a fraud all along. Of course Xena reassures him that he has always had the true heart of a warrior, and he regains his old panache, making up a very funny song (see below) on the spot about his warrior heart.

Joxer's dilemma in this episode is faced by anybody lucky enough to achieve something of which they are proud. Is the you that worked your butt off on something the same you that sits on the couch being lazy and eating too much barbecue? With creative work, the feeling that all you are doing is opening yourself to the Muse makes this even more pressing. I think this is really difficult for people like David Bowie whose peak was so world shatteringly good. No artist could have kept up the level of excellence of The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, and Aladin Sane. Ever since then he's had to live with the questions, "Who was that who wrote and performed those albums? and Who am I now?" And the rest of us have to do the same things with regards to our own minor achievements.

Is Xena's answer that we have warrior's hearts enough? I'm not so sure.

Oh yeah, below are the lyrics to the version of the version of Joxer the Mighty from this episode. You can hear the song here.

Joxer the Mighty
Roams through the countryside
He never needs a place to hide
With Gabby as his sidekick
Fighting with her little stick
Righting wrongs and singing songs
Being mighty all day long
He's Joxer—he's Joxer the Mighty!
Oohhhhhh—
He's Joxer the Mighty
He's really tidy
Everybody likes him
'Cause he has a funny grin
Joxer—
Joxer the Mighty!

Joxer the Mighty
He's very tidy
Everyone admires him
He's so handsome it's a sin
When you're in jeopardy
Don't call the cavalry
There's a better remedy
(Although he doesn't work for free)
He's every man's trusty,
He's every woman's fantasy,
Plus he's goo-oood company
He's Joxer—
I'm Joxer the Mighty!

Blood—valour—and victory! Ha-HA!
Joxer the Mighty
He's very tidy
Everyone admires him
He's so handsome it's a sin
When things get grim
He'll take it on the chin
If you're in jeopardy
Caused by the enemy
Don't call the cavalry
There's a better remedy
(Although he doesn't work for free!)
He's every man's trusty,
He's every woman's fantasy,
Plus he's goo-oood company
Look out! He's Joxer--
Joxer the Mighty!
Joxer the Mighty!!!

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Season 2, Episode 10- The Xena Scrolls

I don't want to anger the Muse by criticizing what is perhaps her greatest inspiration, Xena Warrior Princess, but a couple of thoughts have occurred to me while re-watching the entire run on the excellent DVD set you can buy on amazon now.

Season 2, Episode 10 ("The Xena Scrolls") is a really fun send-up of Raider's of the Lost Ark, with Renee O' Connor (normally Gabrielle) playing the Indiana Jones character, Lucy Lawless (normally Xena) playing a mix of the two female protagonists from the first two Raider's films, and Ted Raimi (normally Joxer) playing a fantastic Inspector Clouseau type character who is later revealed to be a salesman from New Jersey.

While defeating nazis and uncovering "The Xena Scrolls" (which were written by Gabrielle centuries earlier) Ares, God of War, is accidentally summoned. He wants to get out of the cave and help Hitler impose a new order on the world. Now, sadly, what this means is that in two millenia Ares just didn't learn anything. He recycles the same old talking points that he used to make in an attempt to get Xena to be his general on earth. Given the story arc involving Ares thus far, this is disappointing; in Season 2, Episode 8 ("Ten Little Warlords") Xena saved Ares' life because if she didn't one of nine very bad mortals would have ascended into immortality and been even worse than Ares. During much of the episode, Ares is rendered mortal, and he learns what it is like to be human, including getting hung over and getting the tar beat out of him. It is very effectively done, and at the end we get the feeling that he has learned something and from this point on will be at least a little bit more sensitive to human concerns.

Now I'm not saying they should have made Ares into a nice guy god (as Hercules is a nice guy demigod in the series).  What they should have done is made him a warlike zealot motivated by genuinely moral concerns for people he now cares about. Everything he does would still lead to war, but the air of tragedy from "Ten Little Warlords" would have been preserved and the level of narrative and psychological subtlety we get with Xena and Gabrielle would have continued with Ares. This would not have been difficult, when we see him in the late 1930's in the Xena Scrolls episode he would cast his lot in with Stalin, not Hitler, and make plausible sounding arguments for why Xena has to let him out to help Stalin take over the world. Then when Xena (who incarnates into the character played by Lawless) has to imprison him again to prevent this it would have been more tragic.

Another interesting facet of Ten Little Indians not exploited well enough is the way in which the lack of a sitting god of war makes people more angry and likely to fight over the littlest thing. Gabrielle becomes pushy and violent, but Xena does not. This is explained by the fact that Xena has already mastered the rage latent inside of her. Now here is a very interesting fact, comic sometimes sidekick Joxer does not become more violent either! From this it follows that he has experienced great rage and learned to master it. All of his goofiness is then to some extent a mask so as to not give in to the dark side. But this conclusion is never explicitly discussed by Xena and Gabrielle in the episode, and things go on much the same with Joxer.

Don't misunderstand me, both episodes are aesthetic triumphs, as are all episodes of Xena. It's quite simply the best show ever. So I am not presuming to tell Sam Raimi (also director of Army of Darkness, and the Spider Man franchise) et. al. how to do their jobs. But part of the fun of great art is thinking about how in retrospect things could have been better. This does not however mean that any mortal man or woman could have done better at the time of creation. If Xena teaches us anything, it is that such hubris must be avoided.

I can tell you what they say in space

My rough drafts are usually twice as long as my final drafts. Just getting the ideas out requires letting my id run rampant, but then I do twenty or so rewrites. Here's a bit that was cut out on the first rewrite of Chapter 3 of Philosophy Through Video Games. The (yes, probably unethical) anti-Baby Boomer bias of a Generation Xer who has sweated blood on the academic job market is apparent in every word. You see, things went to crap on their watch. Yessir. Luckily my wife and co-writer (whose first drafts are much better) have saved the book from this kind of thing.
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The latter third of the twentieth century was one series of let-downs after another. With very few exceptions, popular music never again achieved the combination of music hall melodic brilliance and sheer rockingness of the early 1970’s glam and proto-punk artists. Median incomes in inflation-adjusted dollars stagnated and decreased in much of the West after this period. Religious fanatics in the United States and post-colonial societies both used their countries’ oil wealth in an attempt to “poison everything.”

No elegy for the twentieth century is complete without remarking on the sad fate of modern science and technology. During the first two-thirds of this period, median life expectancy radically increased due to the development of vaccines, anti-biotic drugs, and a renewed appreciation of the importance of cleanliness. These developments of course kept people alive long enough to die of heart disease, car crashes, and cancer – none of which were cured during the final third of the century.

In the first two-thirds, we developed satellite communications and the ability to put people on the moon. Visionary science fiction promised a new world of space exploration much cooler than the original period of Western colonization. Star Trek even gave us the hope that (in virtue of the prime directive) this could be done without genocide. But unfortunately, in the latter third of the twentieth century humanity gave up.

In the first two-thirds of the twentieth century the chemical and neurological revolutions uncovered the physical basis of drugs such as marijuana, yage, peyote, and hallucinogenic mushrooms used widely in stone-age people’s religious ceremonies. This research actually led to the synthesis of new psycho-active drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide and methelenedioxymethamphetamine.  But, in spite of the fact that every great rock band (as well as the majority of the so-called “creative class” driving post-industrial economies) experimented with such mind altering drugs, a new era of prohibition descended on the West, one just as stupid as the previous war on alcohol. Thus, in the final part of the twentieth century, the pharmaceutical exploration of inner space was shut down just as the exploration of outer space ended. Therapeutic effects of any chemicals that make people feel good or are connected with creative activity and weirdness were henceforth not to be studied in private industry or our research universities. Henceforth, the only legal psycho-active drugs would be those that alleviated the anxiety of generations of twitchy television babies. And as of this writing, people are in prison the world over for smoking pot.

In the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, general relativity, special relativity, and quantum mechanics were discovered, tested, and used (along with the now defunct space program) to create cool new technology. In the final third of the twentieth century pure physics became bogged down in abstruse mathematical and quasi-metaphysical (possibly pseudo)  problems, the likes of which would make a medieval theologian blush. And nobody is even hinting at any cool new technology arising from these debates.

In this heady milieu of shattered dreams, crushed aspirations, and Prozac, just one truly cool thing transpired. Video games! But even here the sad fate of artificial intelligence is paradigmatic, in large part because the greatest hopes for A.I. crested just when the civilizational darkness began to descend upon us.

Random thoughts for January, 2008

I've been working my ass off non-stop for five months, and I'm starting to get worried that pretty soon I will have no more ass.

I know what you're thinking, and you're right, people shake their heads in disbelief, especially when I saunter down the street weaving to and fro, overbalancing for my rapidly diminishing ass. Who would of thunk that the ass was so important for just walking around?

And I take no comfort in the fact that scientists in Sweden are in the process of designing new chairs and couches for people like me. And University of California research scientists are burning through hundreds of millions in start-up grants in a pathetic attempt to design the most perfect prosthetic ass.

Trust me, we still won't be happy.

The Dead Milkmen penned a song about this evening, and you can watch it performed here. I wish the Circle Jerks had written it.

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In the future, the title of every art work will include the phrase, "F*** You." It will be really transgressive. It will problematize the distinction between artist and audience. It will collapse the distinction between art world and "real world." Oh boy!

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Every human being has one useless superpower and one totally inextricable, albeit ultimately harmless, vice.

Real human psychology is a sad parody of Jung's duality of man.  The super hero and super villain reside in all of us, yet in such attenuated forms that there is nothing to get too excited about.  In fact, let's go back to discussing sitcoms. You were telling me for the umpteenth time with great relish how Ozzy Osbourne is really Homer Simpson. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

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Decent writing requires ruthlessness with oneself.

Rather, decent writing requires repeated rewriting, and decent rewriting demands ruthlessness with oneself.  You have to look at part of your own mind (the rought draft) as if it were foreign, and then you have to subject that part to the harshest criticisms, and then have the strength to improve in light of those criticisms. Then you have to do this again and again and again.

I suspect that this is part of the explanation of why intellectuals in the twentieth century were such marks for ruthless people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and (in Chomsky's case) Pol Pot. Of course, most of the explanation is basic bad faith of the sort Nietzsche and Freud thematized.  And Chomsky is an a-hole.

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If I could make only one prayer, it would be that Thomas is kind, curious, creative, hard-working, and joyous, that great passions and interests arise from these virtues, and that he grows up in a world that values such things.

full of bile

Sorry no blogging for a few days. The book is due in two weeks and we're trying to make it perfect.

Also, I had another what I think are gall bladder attacks two nights ago, and still feel crappy as a result. These (if that's what they are) aren't the most painful experiences in the world as some people describe them, though for sheer sustained pain over hours at a time they are up there. It's hard to say though, I tend to be a real wimp about distracting minor inconveniences and basically stoic about big things. One thing I'm not stoic about is the fact that tomorrrow's visit to the doctor begins a what might be a prolongued bout of dealing with American health care industry.

Things I'm already dreading: (1) getting referred back and forth between specialists and testing places ad infinitum, (2) the fact that when they do a test the lab technician doesn't tell you anything and then you get a call on the phone a few days later, (3) the fact that your mortality chances can go way up if you get a doctor that overprescribes treatement (e.g. mandates surgery when you don't need it), (4) the way doctors are for the most part so terrible at explaining anything and treat you as if you are an idiot when they do, (5) the way American healthcare today embodies the army's ethos of "hurry up and wait," but instead of being surrounded by comrades you are surrounded by very sick and often very irritating people, (6) the fact that droning televisions have colonized hospitals and doctor's offices,  (7) the fact that I have to drive myself all over the damn place even though I feel like crap, (8) the fact that my insurance company only gives me access to certain doctors, greatly exacerbating the driving, (9) being on hold forever with the insurance company, which does not have the basic decency to just stick with Muzak but instead interrupts it with blood pressure raising voice recordings that could initially be mistaken for the operator, so you can't even read a book while on hold, (10) the fact that all the talk about "patient autonomy" in medical ethics is a complete sham; there is no autonomy as long as these jerks withhold medicine unless you do what they say, (11) the fact that it is so difficult to get decent pain medication because of the unconstitutional war on drugs, and (12) the fact that I can't help out with Thomas very well when I'm indisposed.

The War on Drugs aspect of this is abominable. If you have reoccurring pain that is yet to be diagnosed, it is very difficult to get pain medicine unless you happen to go to the emergency room during the occurrence of the pain. The reason for this is that (along with imprisoning terminally ill people for smoking cannibis) Bush's minions have arrested and de-licensed doctors for "overprescribing" pain medication (in many cases to people made suicidal from chronic pain). But then when you go to the emergency room, they do triage and at no point consider pain management to be relevant to dealing with the emergency. As a result you can wait for five or more hours before anyone even sees you. And then they don't give you anything for the pain until you've been diagnosed, which can take much longer.

In grad school I had these weird blisters in my throat so excruciatingly painful they made me cry. At the point the pain was unbearable I hadn't eaten for two days and was having real difficulty drinking (it started as a sore throat and just got worse). When I went to the emergency room I waited for five hours, and then when a doctor finally saw me they said it was probably "some kind of bacteria" and that I'd have to stay the night for dehydration if I couldn't drink this big glass of water.  And they would not give me any pain medication until I drank the water, which took me another hour to do from agonizing sip by sip. When hours later I was finally able to get the pain medication, surprise, surprise, it was much easier to drink.

Is it so crazy for me to think that part of the reason the United States leads the industrialized world in preventable deaths in hospitals is because of the Puritanical attitudes towards anything that might alleviate pain?

Maybe, just maybe all this needless suffering and death has prevented Rush Limbaugh from getting his drugs. But why should the rest of us who are not going to abuse pain medication suffer and die for Rush Limbaugh? We shouldn't, the system is crazy and only exists to make Republican couch potato bullies feel better about themselves for sticking it to the hippies and the nigras (Nixon was quite explicit about gaining votes from whites in this way, as were Reagan's strategists). And sadly, it's one more case where Democrats are too cowardly to stand up and do what is right. As Kinky Friedman says, "Drugs won the drug war." It is a depressing measure of political dysfunction in this country that we can't declare defeat and stop inconveniencing the vast majority of people who are never going to have a drug problem.

Sorry for going on so long. If you had the prospect of another gall bladder attack spent in the emergency room without pain medication, you'd be pissed too. If it's any consolation, at some point in your life you almost certainly will have to deal with the asininity of the American health care system at a time when you are of course least prepared to do so.

I should be in a good mood because my gall bladder gets to be measured with ultra-sound today. My fortune cookie last week said, "Face problems with dignity." I realize the above whining has the potential to anger the fortune cookie gods.

thoughts on Emelianov/Lawlor brouhaha

Check out Mikhail Emelianov's extraordinarily entertaining take-down of Leonard Lawlor in these four posts.

(1) The Sacrifice of Intellectual Self-Discipline: The Case of Leonard Lawlor
(2) On the Surface of Things: The Case of Leonard Lawlor II
(3) Acknowledging Acknowledgements (Acknowledgingly?)
(4) Leonard Lawlor: A Philosopher, A Thinker, (A Poet Perhaps)

Make sure and read through to the final one, which has the most detailed discussion of Lawlor's lazy prose as well as suggested translations. It's hilarious and depressing.

If I understand it, Lawlor did basically competent workmanlike exegesis until he decided it was time to put on his big boy pants and be a big P philosopher, at which point he embarked upon a life of doing his best to instantiate as many irritating Derridean and Heideggerian prose tropes as he could get away with.

Part of my great animus against Derrida (and the other part is that he was a bad man) is that a lot of people have done this. It's the John Sallis Mafia career path, one I almost set out upon years ago. You begin by writing hagiographic yet reasonably clear things about what some philosopher unjustly neglected by the analytic tradition would think about X, but then increasingly experiment with imitating Derrida's and to a lesser extent Heidegger's writing style (this is to be separated from Luc Ferry and Alain Renault's widely accepted (in France) claim that Derrida is nothing more than Heidegger plus Derrida's writing style, and hence really nothing more than Derrida's writing style). If you can get away with it, it makes you feel pretty good. If you strike the right poses and network well, some of Sallis' capos will write inflated blurbs on your books. Nobody will read said books, but the group of you will persist in the delusion that the uninitiated cannot see the bottom because the water of your prose is deep, as opposed to unbelievably shallow yet muddy. And in any case, you are now higher up in the Mafia than all those graduate students and teachers from branch campuses and community colleges who have to suffer your prose in all of the cultural-revolution-like presentations you get to inflict on others now at academic conferences. Those lesser beings must be forever satisfied with the patina of celebrity passing from Heidegger and Derrida to Sallis, to his capos, to you, and then finally down to them.

And through all this you learn that it feels really good to get to crap on others, even if the price is being crapped on yourself.

As a brief aside, let me say that this issue is going to be gone when the last Baby Boomer retires. Their overwhelming penchant for playing Derrida or Heidegger dress-up was always somewhat hampered by the fact that they didn't buy each other's books. As a result, for the last twenty years, derivative Derrideana constituted the hardest genre of academic publications to sell, and as a result it has been increasingly difficult for younger scholars who even remotely engage in it to publish enough for tenure. Note that this has all been reported exhaustively in the Chronicle of Higher Education's train of articles about the lit crit "theory" wars, and it explains in large part why English professors are writing much more accessible prose now. [And incidentally, it also explains why the cover blurb encomiums that members of the Sallis Mafia grace one another with have become so unhinged, full of more and more implausibly third-tier-movie-critics-who-get-free-stuff-from-the-studios claims such as "the best book written on X!" One cannot but help to think of a set of life-long grifters who at some level knows that the gig is about to be up.]

Before anyone reading this starts planning a jazz funeral for Lawloresque prose, some some perspective is in order. Well over 99% of published philosophy will disappear from history, so it is not on the grounds that what they are producing is incidental that I am here beating up on those who get off on playing Derrida/Heidegger dress-up. Nor would I argue that I've written anything remotely less incidental; counterexamples to views that are antecedently wildly implausible do not count for much in the history of thought. That's fine; almost all published philosophy is incidental. Education in philosophy would be improved if professors didn't pretend otherwise.

No, I'm in no position to mock anybody for instantiating historic levels of badness. Rather, the specific kind of bad philosophical prose style on display in Sallis, Lawlor, etc. disturbs me because it so strongly reminds me of all the people I've known who become possessed by a celebrity's forceful persona. For example, tons of people read "No One Here Gets Out Alive," or see "The Doors Movie," and then start slouching around like Jim Morrison half the time. Or consider all the people so profoundly moved by Bukowski's "Bar Fly" that they start to ape the behavior of the fictitious Henry Chinanski whenever they get drunk. Or just go to any rural town that still has a big enough population to support teenagers and watch the poor kids try to act like the celebutards MTV shoves down their collective maw. People get a weird psychic jolt and illusory feeling of coolness out of pretending to be somebody who has the right kind of glamor. And when I see people with Ph.Ds organize themselves around doing the functional equivalent vis a vis academic celebrities I just have no hope whatsoever for humanity.

THINGS THAT I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO EXPLAIN, BUT DO-

(I.) The philosophical prose stylings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Deleuze and Guatarri were sui generis and part of those thinkers' genius. The job of the mediocre rest of us is to explain, apply, critically assess, expand, evolve, and when necessary reject the ideas of these thinkers. The claim that Heidegger wrote that way is about as irrelevant as the prisoner who notes that Jesus too was a prisoner. In the words of Bob Dylan, "Yeah, but you're not him."

(II.) None of the above is against Continental Philosophy: (1) I rate Heidegger, Foucault, and the members of the Frankfurt School as vastly more important than any living philosopher, (2) my favorite philosopher is Schopenhauer, (3) one of the heroes of the book I'm writing on video games is Michael Wheeler, (4) I don't share Ferry and Renault's judgement about Derrida as a philosopher and am in fact deeply ambivalent about him, and (5) of the philosophers of my (or perhaps my older brother's) generation, I've learned the most from John Protevi (and the fact that he is one of Sallis' students and himself has a really nice philosophical prose style shows how little I know anything; take everything written above except for the empirical claims about the relative unsaleability of certain genres of publications with a grain of salt). Oh crap, I'm doing the acknowledgment thing that Emelianov skewers.

(III.) Please don't send me humorlous e-mails berating me as a horrible person because I've publicly said negative things about someone who is supposedly "a nice guy." I am really tired of that. (a) Maybe being a "nice guy" is consistent with unprofessional, atrocious bullying of people who have less power than you but the gall to disagree on minor points. Maybe one can be "a nice guy" and use one's celebrity to have sex with groupies who in the academia all happen to be people over whom the celebrity has professional power such as students and teachers at lower tiered institutions (and I'm not making this accusation about anybody mentioned here; but the fact is that we all know "nice guy" academic celebrities from the Baby Boomer "love" generation who did this and with Viagra I assume still do). But if this is so, so much the worse for niceness. Moral worth is not measured by how polite people are to sycophants and those who can help them get them ahead. (b) The claim of nicecenss is irrelevant. (c) It's false in any case. It is not nice to sin against the Muse and Lady Philosophy by crapping on your readers through willfully obscure prose. It's not nice (I guess because one is "rethinking") to willfully neglect to discuss or even cite any of the relevant arguments put forward by other  (analytic and continental) philosophers. In both cases it's a scam to try to get people to treat you like an important philosopher who merits lots of interpretive work, and I'm sorry. Ever since that great John Cusack/Angelica Houston movie we all know that there's nothing nice about being on the grift.

sad, but true

I am a degenerate failure.

No matter how I try, I can't get over my deep love for the music of Billy Joel, even (perhaps especially) including his maudlin yet irritatingly self-aggrandizing anthems like "Piano Man."

I have long envisioned a support group for people like me. It requires the following rungs (I find the metaphor of a ladder helpful in these things). We:

1. Admit that we are powerless over Billy Joel—that our lives have become unmanageable.
2. Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves (the early Elvis) could restore us to sanity.
3. Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the Sun Records era Elvis as we understood Him.
4. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admit to the pre-RCA Elvis, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Are entirely ready to have Elvis remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.
9. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admit it.
11. Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with Elvis as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Have had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to other Billy Joel fans, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

In my naivety I thought these twelve rungs would be helpful for people with all sorts of problems, not just Billy Joel fandom. For example, I thought that people who eat their food too fast or who eat the chips at Mexican restaurants too loudly would benefit enormously.

But what a damn hypocrite I turned out to be!  Here I am today lurking in my office just blasting "Big Shot," and "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me" into my ear phones while the C.D. case of the Sex Pistols' "Never Mind the Bollocks" is prominently displayed by my keyboard so as to fool my long suffering wife. The whole vicious cycle has started up again and these furtive Billy Joel purges will again become a shameful daily necessity.

There is only one thing to do. I'm going to start invoking the Vegas era Elvis in the twelve rungs. Fat Elvis knew karate and would have beat the crap out of his younger self for ever allowing the Jordanaires back up singers to ruin all his RCA stuff, and if his karate failed him, a couple of members of the Memphis mafia could have held down Mr. Skinny while the older Elvis forced him into one of those rhinestone jumpsuits. That would be totally cool.

I'm serious, it's the same damned song

My crack research team has uncovered a horrifyingly dark truth, one indicative of all that is wrong with contemporary academic philosophy.

The crappy zombie song that has set the web afire is not only non-rocking and lame, it also plagiarizes a beautiful and moving cloud song called "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell.  He even says "I thought of minds that way" instead of "I thought of clouds that way."

You fools!  One arose from among you, penning a zombie classic that managed to use both the diminished and augmented fifth chord in the same song without sounding forced or atonal.  One from among you presented a song whose Chalmeresque lyrics were not overly obvious and yet also deeply evocative.  One of your own sacrificed himself to the vocal art of the "dying-cat" style without once plagiarizing Joni Mitchell.  And when he came down from the mountain (or rather the tape recorder in his living room), what did he find?  Idolators, worshipping at the feet of derivative bit of wimp folk, just because it made you feel smart.

Well, all I have to say is that you won't have Richard Nixon to push around any more.